access data on apache server using xampp

Question

i am writing an iphone application, which basically uploads and downloads Images to/from a server. in order to test my code i installed xampp and everything works fine now. if i upload an image the server creates a folder named with the UDID-number of the device (via the http-method POST a php script is called).

but if i enter the directory of such a folder and the name of the image in the browser i can see it in the browser. i am a newby on this topic and have no idea if there are better possibilities. my questions are: should i use databases where i save the images or is it just fine to create folders via a php script and save the images into these folders? can i hide all the datastructure, such that you cannot access it via a browser but only with the iphone application? (the application should only be able to download pictures randomly). thx

Answer 1

If you do not want an image serverable by apache, you need to store it outside the webroot. So if your webroot is C:\xampp\htdocs, you could store the images in a folder structure under C:\xampp\images

Your iphone app would have to do a little more work then to pull a random one and send it to the user.